shelving, shelving, shelving...

 Can you really have too many shelves in your game room?

awful officers...

I've got plenty of American command figures for the SpanAm game. Six Teddy Roosevelts, three Pershings, seven standard bearers. Geesh... it even looks like about half the Buffalo Solders wear chevrons. I don't really have any figures that will work as Spanish officers, though. I suppose I'll have to paint some cockades on a few of the straw hats and use those figures as officers. From what I've read the Spanish officers generally didn't wear distinctions in the field anyway. Very practical. No sense in making yourself a target for Cuban guerrillas after all.

americans on the march...

The SpanAm game I' m running next February could have as many as 12 or 15 players. I normally run skirmish games for that many players since it's too time consuming and expensive to create complete armies for both sides. Even with inexpensive 54mm figures the time it takes to paint everything is considerable.

a continental diversion...

I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is to paint 54mm figures rather than 28mm. There have been a couple of Armies in Plastic German figures in my bits box for a few years now. I picked them out of $.25 bin at a local show. I've not felt a great deal of love for Armies in Plastic figures. But now that I've painted one, I think my tune is changing

spanish american war starts afresh...

OK, I had my 25mm fix with the Gauls and Romans.  Working on a Master's degree has me a bit burned out on AWI stuff. So what's a guy to do? Well, I do have some BMC and AIP Spanish American War figures... and I did commit myself to running a SpanAm game in February, 2011. Better get painting!

romans on the march...

 So I've been back into historical gaming for a few years now but never really picked up any of my old projects. I've been leaning more towards doing games in 54mm due to the exorbitant price of metal figures and aging eyesight. Then I noticed that Wargames Factory had their plastic 'Caesar's Legions' figures on sale for $9.99 per box. Since I had a couple hundred Old Glory Gauls sitting around I figured it would be a good match. I've got the first of six boxes of Romans completed.

a hoard of gauls...

A Gallic army is a necessity for any serious ancients player. After all, they fought against just about everyone at one time or another. These are mostly Old Glory figures from probably 15 years ago. I think I purchased them about the time that DBM was first published. Maybe it was DBA... I don't remember. Anyway, they've been sitting around for years. I had painted up a DBA army's worth but had plenty of unpainted figures sitting around.

before the blogging age...

Long ago we snapped pictures with SLR cameras. Then we made web pages. Before that we actually typed. My gaming extends through all those technologies. Rules I've written and my old miniature galleries have been moved to here: https://sites.google.com/site/petiteguerre/home.

my game room...

After 35 years of wargaming I think I can assume it is not a passing fad. So, when we decided to move into a larger home, a wargaming room was pretty high on my priority list. We hit paydirt. The house we chose provided us with a large finished family room in the basement. Heh, heh, heh... we don't have any kids. My days of crouching over a dimly lit, crowded hobby desk in a dirty, cobweb infested, underground cubby hole are over. And, since a furniture upgrade was in the works, too, I had the perfect spot to 'store' our old sofa and recliner.

the second game...

We played our second game of 'Victory Without Quarter' on Saturday. Lots of fun! We had to tweak things a little bit to account for a larger scale and different mounting systems. My 54mm figures are mounted two figures to a stand so each regiment was composed of four stands of musketeers and two stands of pikemen.